Improve Customer Engagement to Win Business

This is your time to create remarkable experiences in order to create lasting relationships with your customers. Lead with initiative and own the moment.

What does customer-focused mean to your company? Passion for helping customers? Serving customers? To improve customer engagement would be our choice. But lots of possible options, aren’t there?

In May 2007, Ranjay Gulati, a Professor of Strategy and Organizations at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review entitled “Silo Busting: How to Execute on the Promise of Customer Focus”.

A timeless theme. His thesis is as true today as it was then — that while many companies claim to be focused on their customers, they are unable to deliver on these promises within their current company culture. The basis for this argument is that companies continue to focus much more on their own needs when compared to customer needs. One way around this issue is by improving consumer engagement.

Gulati identified four values that companies must adopt in order to successfully be customer-focused. These are capability, cooperation, coordination, and connection.

Capability

According to Gulati, companies need more “generalists”. These are described as…